Divining Rod

Sound installation for brass slide on guitar strings with computer processing; activated by Arduino, servo, found wood, and a lot of fishing wire.

Shown at the Wave Cave at CalArts, spring 2011.

The “generative” angle came into play in the Arduino code. I felt that letting the brass slide go careening at random times to random positions was quickly exhausting to listen to. So I built a sort of superstructure above the base-level random decisions—a multi-level system which loops random patterns at varying timescales. So, as the slide is sawing along, it will get stuck in little eddies, vortices, in which it repeats a given gesture (be it short or long) a few times before moving on. Then, I think the listener takes it from there, as cognition begins to hear order, making phrases out of the shapes.